Pirate Party's Rick Falkvinge: online activism is 'not enough'

Online activism is not enough; you need to get people out onto
the streets in order to have real-world political influence, argues
Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish
Pirate Party.

Speaking on a panel at Guardian Activate, he said: "Discussing
something online is not enough. You need to bring people out into
the streets so that others can see people that they identify with
or else people are not going to take a new movement to heart. You
need to give people role models, using social markers and making
people feel included."

He explained how the Pirate Party encouraged activists to wear
clothes with the party's logo in order to make them visible to the
outside world. "We built what looked like a typical hierarchical
organisation across Sweden, but it was actually a distributed,
collaborative effort."

Having launched in 2005, he managed to get more than 225,000
votes in the European Election and secure two seats in the European
Parliament, all this was achieved with a very small budget compared
with other political parties.

Falkvinge went on to criticise politicians in democratic
societies who see higher engagement as a threat rather than an
opportunity. He said that there is a "complete clash" in the
European parliament between those who are comfortable with the net
and the connected lifestyle and those born into a hierarchical
world, who are surprised when citizens start contacting them en
masse over email. "Some of these politicians see this contact as
cyber attacks or a soft-form of terrorism. What are these people
thinking? The disconnect is total," he said.

The key to starting to solve this is to make sure that the
"connected lifestyle" has more representation in the "political
nobility", i.e. those old school politicians born to an unconnected
world.

Fellow panellist Ivan Segal, executive director from Global Voices, a company
that amplifies local voices of activism, said that organisations
need to learn let go and trust their community. "As a manager of a
community, you don't need to control everything, just listen."

When asked how to reignite a community that had started to lose
interest in a cause, he said: "Not everything has to live for ever.
You shouldn't expect everything to live ad infinitum. Maybe citizen
projects should have a finite goal?"

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament for The
Movement, explained how the Icelandic financial crisis in 2008
shook up politics in the country and has led to the rise of a new
political party focusing on transparency and accountability. She
set up the Movement in order to aggregate various grassroots groups
with a clear "hit-and-run" objective, where the aim was to go into
the political system and make the necessary changes before
getting corrupted. "We want to make a bridge between the public and
the republic," she said.

Having launched Movement eight weeks before the election, they
achieved seven percent of the vote. "We made a lot of effort to not
become like politicians but be like human beings and admit we
didn't always know what was going on."